A Company of Proprietors

Every year, Wynn Las Vegas organizes a snowman contest.?Departments compete using any number of materials to create winning snowmen.?The most recent winner, from our maintenance team, included a miniature working HVAC system.?Many of the employees contributing to these snowmen have been doing so for years, and each of the entries exhibited hard work, artistry, and real pride in ownership.?As a judge, I must say I was impressed, but I was not surprised.?

Ours is a culture of owners, of proprietors.?Since joining Wynn Resorts in 2017, I have seen countless examples of our employees, at every level, exhibiting complete ownership of the guest experience, of the quality of workmanship and of financial responsibility.?It is a unique aspect of our culture and it’s why, in an environment where many hospitality companies are struggling to find employees, we are fully staffed.?Demand for front line Wynn job openings far outpaces available positions.

Amidst an ever-changing Las Vegas Strip, I’ve thought long and hard over the past five years about why this is the case and how to make sure it remains so.?It is a defining attribute that directly impacts our company’s success.?My observations so far?

1. Recognize it is your employees who own your brand, not you.?As a hospitality executive, you may think you own your brand. You don’t. Your employees do. Be able to explain your values (in plain language), consistently exhibit them yourself, invest your employees in them, allow your employees to express those values naturally and, every day, hold your employees accountable for fulfilling those values. Believe me, quality employees will rise to the challenge. They will own it
2. Push important decisions to those who understand the subject matter. ?Over time, the natural corporate tendency is a rush to centralize in pursuit of efficiency.?We avoid this reflexive tendency, except in areas where it is clearly obvious to do so.?It is property level management that sees and knows the customer.?They should, and do, make very important decisions across operations, marketing, and capital deployment.?Centralize less.?Allow important decisions to be made on the front line.?You will attract better talent and that talent will own their respective domains.
3. Run lean at corporate and instill in your corporate team a dedication to service.?The more you centralize, the more you create corporate infrastructure, the more that infrastructure then becomes disconnected from the customer.?I regularly tell potential recruits that we are the “biggest little company in the industry.”?By pushing important decisions and key talent closer to the customer, we can maintain a small group of highly talented folks at corporate who understand their job is to give our operators the tools they need to succeed (whether it be capital, technology, new business opportunities, etc.).
4. Encourage rapid decision making and do not punish failure after a calculated risk.?I regularly coach our property executives to constantly have a “bias to action.”?Legacy industries have a lot to learn from Silicon Valley.?Empowering your people to make decisions, individually or in small groups, and take calculated risks creates a sense of ownership in the execution and the outcome.?Conversely, working your way to the “95th confidence interval” and making decisions by committee actively discourages ownership.?
5. Create real accountability and watch the results every day. ?Despite the “financial size” of our business, we are blessed with a very small geographic footprint.?Our managers stay close to the customer and “eat their own dog food” every day.?They are highly accountable for the businesses they “own” and they know it and love it.?We have also invested heavily in near real-time KPI reporting at a level that creates daily transparency.?Senior management engages with line management daily based on those KPIs.?Know what’s happening.?Use a magnifying glass if necessary.?Trust me, this approach is infectious and will make you far more nimble.
6. Respect and reward your talent. ?During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we proactively decided to pay our team members full wages and benefits while our U.S. properties were closed.?We did not furlough.?Why??As a matter of principal, we did not believe in letting our colleagues down when things were most bleak.?From a business perspective, we realized it would cost an order of magnitude more to reassemble the unique group of “proprietors” that make up our employee base, than to pay them despite our than current woes.?It wasn’t even a debate when my predecessor proposed this approach to his team and to the Board.?Beyond exigent circumstances like this, day to day transparency, clear and frequent communication, and personalization all show your team members that they are valued.

Over the past several years, we have proactively extended our equity compensation programs deeper and deeper into the organization.?Oftentimes, this is done to instill a sense of ownership among employees.?Ironically, in our case, it has actually distributed ownership to those who already carried themselves with the pride of proprietors.?Executive management’s role in supporting that sense of ownership is often counterintuitive – devolve power, encourage risk taking, run lean and respect your talent.?Trust me, doing so will pay significant rewards over time.

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